I was looking at Randall's latest beauty here, and thinking "Gee, wouldn't that be even cooler if you could click on the sites/phrases and go to the site."

And then I went a little insane...

So check out this version. It's just Randall's large image, but every word/region on the page is linked to either the site it references or something apropos (mostly wikipedia articles). You'll definitely want to scroll, or use your browser's scaling to scale it down.

I understand why Randall made Wikipedia smaller, but... man... I still feel like it's huge. I rely on Wikipedia so heavily, and I feel like lots of people do. Even if I never edit anything on Wikipedia, it's still a gigantic part of my online life. I think Wikipedia is becoming somewhat like Email and Listservs. Something that's so big and so mainstream that it isn't really interesting to edgy webusers anymore.

I only felt that Nico Nico Douga and Pixiv, the japanese sites akin to Youtube and DeviantArt, are missing, they're really big at that side of the world. I thought their absence was a little strange, since 2channel and Mixi are there.

I see that Brickshelf has a tiny island. I was a bit surprised not to see some of the other LEGO-related communities represented, such as Bricklink and MOCPages. At the present time, they are in fact both more active than Brickshelf, which has fallen on hard times, server-response-time-wise. There are also active LEGO communities in Europe and Japan. Oh well, you can't step into the same river even once on the Internet, or, as Greg Bear calls it, "The Net of a Million Lies".

I'm working on a version of this map with all the suggestions of missing places people have been making in this thread. It already includes the Eye of Zuckerburg, and Wikipeida - as a giant floating blimp! And I shall call it: Online Communities 2.1. Anyone got any more requests for inclusion?

Felstaff wrote:Can anyone read* what's around the Isle of Mockery on the Blogosphere Core Region? I can read "People of Walmart" but can't make out anything else, or what it says on the actual island itself.

Thanks in advance.

*and communicate to me what it actually says.

People of walmartLovers(?) EndMDW EndRecacist(?)

and the Island looks like it says "N7edt"

Sorry for the late reply.

This is an interesting question, because it looks like Regretsy laid claim to their name in this region of the internet...

I've sharpened the island up in as many ways as possible and have come up with this ugly .jpg

My working theory from there is that the other "places" do not have dots, therefore they are not websites. It says "Mean End" [near People of Walmart] and I assume the other says something similar... I want to say "lottery end" because that's the only word I can make sense of, but I know that isn't correct.

Love this map. Unfortunately it needs to be updated about every six minutes. A time lapse of how it changes over time would be very cool.

I place myself somewhere in the northern wasteland of unread updates. Like when I post something totally trivial or mundane on facebook or worse share out some stupid thing that is not mine, people comment a blue streak. When I put out anything even remotely original or thought provoking.... NOTHING. I need a higher intellectual caliber of "friends" I guess. Anyway I propose that political entity be named "Northern Ignorupdatamia."

Well, given that "MMO" stands for Massively Multiplayer Online, Starcraft II is indeed an MMO. What you meant to say was that it is not an MMORPG.

... No, it's not. MMOs have to be able to support hundreds (or more) of players in the same shared space at the same time, usually in a persistent world. Starcraft 2 cannot do that - there are not hundreds of players in a single game, and it's certainly not a persistent worldspace. It's not an MMO.

heuristically_alone wrote:I want to write a DnD campaign and play it by myself and DM it myself.

heuristically_alone wrote:I have been informed that this is called writing a book.

I wonder where Formspring got off to? Presumably it would be amongst the other forgotten social networking sites, but given that it caused such a furor during its run, and was closely tied to Facebook, I expected to see some kind of mention of it.

Also, I am yet another guy who finally decided to join thanks to this comic. Absolutely genius.

Kayube wrote:Is anyone else now imagining a version of Hetalia based on the history of the internet?

God, the sheer number of characters and their relationships would be too much of a pain for anyone to write about... Although I do think there should be bits and pieces of "personification of social networks" floating around the internet.

Kayube wrote:Is anyone else now imagining a version of Hetalia based on the history of the internet?

God, the sheer number of characters and their relationships would be too much of a pain for anyone to write about... Although I do think there should be bits and pieces of "personification of social networks" floating around the internet.

Sounds like it'd almost be a cross between Hetalia and OS-tan. Question being, since most of the nations in Hetalia are male and most of the OS-tans are female, what would the social networking sites be?

The numbers are mainly speculation and educated guessing, thanks to a variety of sources, rather than official data (which never gets released anyway, unless you're World of Warcraft, at which point you can happily say "oh look another 3 million users for Q3 2010!") but they're most likely accurate enough for amateur analysis.

McTricks wrote:So is it just me or does the full world of communication look like it's heavily based off of North America?

Also, Where's Aion? Seriously!

Aion is only available on the 3D v.3 map which includes new features such as the infamous "720 degree" view which allows you to see the map in a variety of ways.

Included is the "topography" option which, when rotated correctly, allows you to see the layers of earth beneath the surface. Aion is at this location, along with ALL THE OTHER NEW MMOs SO NEW THEY AREN'T CONSIDERED YET!!! *cough* anyhow...

What I do not understand is why Runescape, a browser [NOT TEXT] MMORPG is included, but AQWorlds (another browser [NOT TEXT] MMORPG) isn't.

Though many people (*cough* WoW addicts *cough*) have never heard of AQWorlds, it is actually an EXTREMELY popular MMO, and has been for YEARS.

Multi-User Dungeons (MUD) were left out of the picture. It's the genre that played a heavy influence on MMO's in general. Ironically enough, it's also the one game that represents the root of what xkcd is all about in online gaming.

I think a nice archipelago of small islands off the coast of MMO Isle would suffice well! You could have a cluster of islands to represent each code directive. Please see the reference MUD tree here.

Always (ever since I found it and started reading it a few years ago...) loved the comic, and just finally decided to sign up for the forums...

Anyway the comment I intend to leave is thus:Loved that I got to see DeviantArt included in this particular map, though I was a bit sad that the site FurAffinity.net wasn't to be found. Though I do realize that it's part of the furry fandom community (yes I'm a fan of the Furry Fandom, however I'm fairly flame proof...), it's effectively as widely used as DeviantArt, and if you were ever to make a part three for whatever reason, I'd love to see it included.

Though I only have mild hopes that the artist will wind up seeing this particular comment here, or if they do, that my request will be considered, but in the absence of anything better to do, I'll post it all the same. ^^

lst wrote:I only felt that Nico Nico Douga and Pixiv, the japanese sites akin to Youtube and DeviantArt, are missing, they're really big at that side of the world. I thought their absence was a little strange, since 2channel and Mixi are there.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed that. Considering the amount of comments on most of the videos posted on Nicovideo.jp, I'm frankly surprised it isn't represented almost as big as Gaia.

This is an improved version of the map with everything you have been asking for. I went through this thread for all the requests for things to add to the map, and every (reasonable) request was answered. Think of it as an early Christmas present.

To get a sense of just how much I added, just open bothmaps, and flick between the two tabs. Like Randall, I cannot guarantee that the sizes will be perfectly accurate. See 'About this map' for more details.

^ Click for full resolution! ^

Ironically this was made for a thread where the purpose is to make xkcd worse. Guess I kinda failed at that. A list of all the new additions can be found in my post on that thread.

By the way, that tower thing in the north of Facebook, well the idea came from this post:

mrt181 wrote:Well, the Facebook Lands are missing theEye of ZuckerbergThe Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.